Coward's Bravery
by NobleCaliber
Summary: He plays a dangerous game, loving her like he does behind her back. She's so good at lying that she can even fool herself, nevermind him. So are they being brave and holding out for someday or being cowards and waiting for always to change?
1. Chapter 1

So, my IPS muse decided to prove it existed by slapping me in face with a handful of plot bunnies. This one will be a two-shot, one focusing on Marshall, the other on Mary.

It's kind of character analysis, not a bunch of plot. I dunno, maybe no plot!

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Granted, he plays a dangerous game, loving a woman like Mary. Loving _Mary_. A woman who would probably never see him the way he sees her. A woman whose very definition of love was derived from the way in which she believes he platonically loves her. A woman who so completely and totally has him by the heartstrings, but doesn't know and most likely wouldn't care.

Was it bravery or stupidity? Love or the just idea of it? Was the love what kept him there or pushed him to leave on the darkest nights?

Either way, he played chicken every day of his life because he was a coward. Yes, he was determined. Well, he used to be. Five years ago, he would have looked you in the eye and told you he loved her and one day she would acknowledge it. He stands in front of a raging bull with nothing but a strip of red cloth because he's afraid to sit in the crowd. He loves an oblivious woman in the shadows because she'd beat the living shit out of him if it ever saw the light of day.

Now he's holding out, leaving it all on the line, being _brave_ because he's a coward. Or is he being a coward because he's sick of telling himself he's brave? Tired of steeling his resolve to just _kiss her, damn it_, and then backing down.

You've got to have a steel gut to fall in love with a woman like Mary, after all. But he never acts on it and she may never know him by his love for her.

He's worked with her a decade, loved her for most of it.

He's afraid to leave, because can he handle that change? Will he survive a life without her? Will _she_? He's terrified to stay, she obviously has no intention of noticing what's right in front of her anytime soon.

He's a coward.

He starts to tell her. Tell her that he cares, that he _loves_ her, damn it. But he ends up backing off because it is the human condition to fear change. He starts to say something, to make his body just lean in and kiss her, but he's too afraid of losing what he's got to try for something more.

He starts to leave; gets all the way to the door, too. But she claims to need him and he holds out, hoping someday that'll be true. Some days it is. Mary's the strongest woman he's ever met, but she's seen things and been through things and sometimes she just needs him to follow her and she walks off her troubles. He's written up both transfer requests and resignation letters more times than he can count, because of her. They all end up in his shredder. He doesn't want to follow her. He wants to walk right by her side.

He hides in relationships with women he doesn't and probably cannot ever love. He hides behind pretending to see them like he sees Mary and he cowers behind _I love you_'s that he knows he doesn't mean. He conceals himself behind meaningless lunch dates and holidays across the table from someone else.

He seeks a filler in his work. Maybe, _just maybe_, if he works a little harder, keeps this or that witness just a little safer, he won't notice that the other side of he bed is either empty or filled by someone who he just doesn't even want there. If he tackles the bad guys a little harder, he can ignore the suffocation he finds walking next to her every day.

Some days, he wishes he could love her like she thinks he does. He wishes he could love her like she were his sister and that thinking of her the way he does would feel like some insane incest. He wishes he could make it believable when he tells observant witnesses that there is nothing there. Aside from her father (Who was around all of, what, seven years?), he's probably the only man ever to love her without a price, especially without expecting to go to bed with her.

When his family asks, he tells them he hasn't found _her_ yet. While _her_ comes across to them as '_the one,_' what he really means is Mary. He hasn't found _her_, he hasn't found how to tell her that he is so all-consumingly in love with her that he wants messy, even though he's a bigger fan of neat and tidy than she is.

He's such a damn coward.

But he plays this dangerous game, loving her over her shoulder and stepping back when she notices him there. Trying to wear his heart on his sleeve when the lioness in her will only tear it to shreds in the first moment of a bloodthirsty rage. Why's he gotta always be the prey?

Maybe it's best like that. Then he can love her how he wants, however quietly, without repercussions. This way, she can't find him out and accuse him of anything. She can't be angry, she can't consciously deny him.

He denies when she suggests that he has a thing for her. She says it like it's the most ridiculous thing on the world, and it's ice water to his gut. He laughs it off, uses the current girlfriend as a cover-up, and insinuates that it's exactly as ridiculous as she says it it.

Coward. He's a coward.

This game is going to kill him. She's already got his heart between her teeth, poised to demolish it, and she's just about got his sanity, too. Good. Maybe if she takes his sanity, he'll do something he won't regret as much as he thought he would.

He keeps playing. He's not sure what hope actually looks like these days, but he assumes he's got none left, regardless. It's been ten years, can anyone have that much hope? He throws in hand after hand, bluffing and occasionally calling her out on her BS, but she winds most rounds. He doesn't dare look over at his chips, for he fears he's almost out.

He keeps playing because it's a habit he doesn't care to break, a pain he's forgotten how to live without. He might even have a little hope left too.

He's so brave.

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Remember, you and the review button are best friends.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Thanks to those of you who reviewed! I wasn't originally even thinking about adding a happy ending because it's kind of more character analysis than actual plot but now I've got a seedling of a way to do that with them both in the same chapter after they've gotten together.

You guys, adding to my insomniatic plot-feeding.

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She's a practically flawless liar. Hell, she's spent most of her working life lying to her family about what she did for a living. Still, it's no small feat when she begins to pile on misconceptions on top of false accusations on top of deranged justification until it doesn't even feel like a lie to look herself in the mirror and say that Marshall has no feelings for her and she none for him. It's such an endless lie, it's the almost the truth. It might just be.

It sure as hell is to her.

She's not sure if it's self-preservation or if it's become a self-destructive habit. She's not sure where the line is drawn between the truth and a mile-high stack of lies. In one man's world, it's denial and in another man's, ignorance. So where does cowardice become bravery and bravery a suit of armor constructed of these flimsy half-truths with too many chinks, worn into battle anyway?

Either way, it's a chain with a heavy weight on the end. She drags it around town, not caring which relationship it crashes into and reduces to rubble because tomorrow, there'll just be another link. It's a fortress made of cardboard boxes and the only purpose the lies serve is taped to a post as a warning to all who enter.

So she sits on the throne in her cardboard castle, making herself believe she holds the power and she's got the key. But she knows there's a duplicate. She stays because maybe, she's brave and she'll fight, but maybe she sits alone on a pauper's throne because she's afraid of what it means to leave.

As hard as it is to lie to herself, there's nothing harder than looking him in the eye when he tells her, in not so many words, that he just wants to fix her and hold her, and force powerful emotions into their place in the dark depths of a jaded, black heart and put on her well-worn mask of indifference.

Somewhere under well-meaning defenses, she knows he loves her and some days, when all bets are off and she can't even keep herself out of those things she's locked away, she considers through gritted teeth that she's never loved anyone as much as she loves him or as much as she wants him to love her.

She's a coward.

In what she considers these moments of weakness, she gets halfway to letting him in. She gets to the last lock, brings the key to it, and then she convinces herself that the moment of hesitation she feels means she shouldn't. So she quickly bolts all the locks again and retreats to where things are familiar.

Some days, she considers, however idly, packing up her little kingdom and setting up shop somewhere else, becoming a lesser man's problem. But she knows that to take it down, she'd have to come out and stand bare for a brief moment in which neither of them would be strong enough to be such cowards.

She hides behind and engagement ring when she knows she'll never exchange those vows. She hides behind one night stands that hold even less meaning than they should. She uses a long-term relationship with a man that wants more than she could ever give him as a crutch, yet another lock on the door.

When she's not refusing to acknowledge whatever the hell is going on between them, she sometimes wishes it wasn't. If he loved her like he was supposed to, they wouldn't be caught here. She wouldn't be torn between stubborn pride and notion that if she'd just let him in, God knows how well he would love her (and how well he already does). She's trapped here because of his love for her and she wants to leave so badly because as cornered as she is by the thought of loving him, he's up against the wall because he doesn't know how to stop what he can still hide.

In her mother and sister's outrage when they found out that she'd broken her engagement to Raph, they'd demanded an explanation. She'd told them simply that he was him and she was her and they'd one day find themselves in a lifeless, loveless marriage if they went through with it. But that little Marshall's advocate in the back of her head had trashed every cell, every fiber of that reasoning until she gave up and went to bed, claiming a headache. It's true, her head did hurt. But her heart hurt more.

She's such a damn coward.

She knows that someday, those lies may rip her apart from the inside out and that no matter how hard you try, secrets have this funny habit of not staying secret. She knows that one day, she'll put it out there, make one of those unspoken dares and he won't back off. She knows that these things that happen in her head and in her heart without her permission, sometimes without her even knowing, will quite possibly ruin her someday, not to mention him. But she doesn't need someday, she never has. All she's ever needed is today.

Maybe the way it is turns out to be the only way it works. Maybe one day, regardless of any reactions she has to the way he feels about her, he wakes up and realizes that she's jaded and bitter and just a bit past a little insane and wonders to himself why, on God's green Earth, he's wasted so long hung up on her. That he realizes that he's the kind of man who wants a family and a future and she's not the kind of woman who can ever give him that.

When he does things that just bleed of the way he loves her, she turns the other cheek, looks the other way. Turns his twisted analogies about messy and being the river and all that mumbo-jumbo back in his face until he doesn't recognize it because she's not strong enough to look it in the eye and deny it.

Coward. She's a coward.

But she can't walk away. Because even though she knows that the way he feels for her is not the way she makes it out to be, she can't pack up her house make of sticks and leave him. Because despite the way she believes she doesn't need anyone, she needs him and she needs to be loved by him. She needs to know that there is someone out there who is so unconditional and expects no return, because one of these days she might just show him how much it means to her.

She stays put because she refuses to see the ticking time bomb she's turned them both into. Because she doesn't know how to live without those little red numbers on the screen and him standing on the other side of the moat, waiting for her to lower the drawbridge.

She's so brave.

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I tried to use the same structure and topics as in Marshall's chapter (Same paragraphs in the same place, same coward lines after the same paragraphs, ect.)

So, I think I may have something for a grand finale, but I can't make any promises.

And remember, reviews are like visits from television's favorite US Marshals- without a bounty on your head…


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